Unlocking Google's Secret Algorithm: A Guide to Ranking #1

What are our marketers meant to do if Google search traffic disappears? How are we meant to market and build a business? Well, we have one of the best to tell us all about it, Ron Fishkin. He's going to break down how he sees the web change in and the role of a marketer changing if Google search traffic is heavily disrupted. But we also have AI on the horizon and we're going to talk a lot about how AI changes the role of the marketer, how AI allows marketers to grow and build a business, and why we believe we are going back to the 1960s, the digital 1960s, the ad age era, and what that means for us marketers and what we need to get better at all of that. On Marketing against the Grain, I'm your co host Kieran Flanagan. I'm here as always with my co host Kip Bodner. Let's get into today's show. So Rand, we appreciate you coming on the show. We always love to have people who are the epicenter at the center of like controversy to come on right when it's happening. So I woke up, I scrolled through my Twitter feed. I still refuse it to call it X. I see the video, you know, the Google leak. So you actually had the Google leak, which is like this leak around how Google search engine works, right? Google is like a bit of a black box. All of us former SEOs or current SEOs always try to figure out like what's the Google search engine doing? And there's this big leak. And you maybe you had a post today on Twitter about it. Could you just like start us at the start? What is the Google leak? Is it interesting and should we care about this?

I'll set the stage for you. I'll tell you the story and then we can talk about what's actually in there or interesting. So May 7, this is, you know, a few weeks ago I get an email from a gentleman who initially did not want to be identified was, was anonymous. He's since decided that he's sort of willing to come forward. His name is Irfan. He's, he currently lives in Tbilisi, Georgia and he's a search marketer, runs an agency there and has, has worked with a lot of big brands including some in the United States. But he emails me and says, hey Rand, I have been having private off the record conversations with a lot of Googlers and ex Googlers and I've also discovered a trove of documents that prove that many of the things you speculated about during your sort of 20 year career in SEO before, before I left Moz and started SparkToro, that those things are true, that they're in Google's ranking systems and that the denials and obfuscation of that information by Google's public representatives was misleading at best and an outright lie at worst. And I'll be totally honest with you, Karen and Kip, I was kind of like, who is this person? I don't know them. Hey, you know that stuff you said for 20 years? You're right. And you know I can prove it. I have all the, all these off the record, it sounded very, I don't know, Orwellian, CIA spook kind of like. Anyway, I emailed back and forth with him a few times. I had a busy schedule and so he scheduled a call for this past Friday and on Friday, mid morning I think must have been quite late in the evening in Georgia where he is not Georgia in the United States, you know, Georgia in the, in the Cox Mountains. And, and so he explains to me, right? We get on the call and he explains, hey, I went to these events. I whatever, I went out drinking with this guy in Berlin or Istanbul or you know, these kinds of things. And this engineer told me this thing and this Google told me this thing and this person. I'm not going to reveal their names because I think he hasn't revealed their names and maybe he doesn't want to. Some of them are names you would probably recognize. A few of them were not names that I knew, but people who had worked at Google. And then I was still very skeptical. I was kind of like, okay, yeah, I don't know what this has to do with me. I recognize that you believe that you think this, but there's nothing on the record. And then he says and a copy of Google searches internal API documentation that basically lets search engineers call a bunch of variables and modules and features that documentation, perhaps not all of it, but a massive chunk, I think 14,000 modules across 2500 plus pages of documentation that was leaked on GitHub sort of, he thinks either intentionally or accidentally uploaded and made public for a period of time when it shouldn't have been. And as he started, as he shows it on his screen, I am reading the names of the modules and the API calls, I'm looking at the documentation and it appears extremely authentic. That guys, is when my eyeballs popped out of my head and I went, oh my God. As you kind of dug deeper into that, when did you finally realize like oh, this is the real deal and could have a lot of implications with Folks who are, who are working with Google search engine. Well, let me, let me first say that Erfan this initially anonymous source but now he's declared himself publicly so I'm using his name. So Erfan said, rand, what I'm hoping is that you will publish something. I think you're the right person to write about this leak and these sorts of pieces of misinformation that we can now credibly show Google didn't. Wasn't telling the truth or the whole truth about. And I said well okay, let me spend some time with this documentation and think about this. But this is pretty interesting. I might write about it. I will, I will get back to you. And so the first thing I did, Kip and Kieran is I contacted Mike King who's the, who's the founder of Ipoll Rank. He runs an agency out of New York. He is well regarded in the search community and the marketing community for being extremely technically knowledgeable. So he's, you know, a quite capable programmer and also deeply knowledgeable about the inner workings of Google search by analyzing patent applications and information retrieval papers and the Department of Justice transcripts, all those kinds of things. It is even true, I hate to admit it because I think they're sort of an evil organization, but Project Veritas leaked some internal documentation last year, in the year prior about things that operations inside Google search, you know, many of which sort of Mike was able to connect the dots between all of these things and elements inside the API as well as the way Google's cloud platform does API documentation, essentially verifying these things. But I don't think that's enough on its own. Right. And Mike and I both have potentially personal interest in making this, you know, in hoping that this is real. So I reached out to some ex Google engineer friends on private messaging apps and asked them if they'd take a look. One of them told me no, I will not look. Get that, get that. And the other two did take a look and said varying comments which I, which I put in the post, but the exact quotes. But it was basically along the lines of if this is not real, this person, the person who created it must have spent years doing it and clearly worked at Google or is familiar with all of the other internal systems at Google because everything about this checks out and looks authentic.

It's very.

Imagine that this is fake.

A couple of things that jump out to me, Rand and I would love to get you like pick your brains on what jumped out to you because many of the things in here I think, Moz. And you have kind of preached over time. And one of the things that's, like, really interesting to show you the level of curiosity you had to have to be a really great search person is there's 14,000 ranking features, right? Like, when you actually think about an SEO's job, you're like, okay, well, let me try to work out this black box. Then you get the paper and says, well, there's over 14,000 things. And when you look at the things, great search people like yourself have said many of these things, right? Like, one of the ones that really jumped out was click duration. I remember you talking about things like click duration, maybe, you know, bounce rate, trying to get the quality of the actual visit. Can you maybe talk about that? And some of the other ones where you looked at and you were like, damn it, I was right. Like, what are the ones that you looked at? You're like, I knew it. I knew that was right.

Yeah. I mean, for years, you know, Google claimed that. Google's public representatives claim that it did not matter whether.